The Met Announces 2010–11 Season

General Manager Peter Gelb and Music Director James Levine yesterday announced the Met’s plans for its 2010–11 season. The lineup features seven new productions, including two company premieres and the first two installments of a new Ring cycle, directed by Robert Lepage and conducted by Maestro Levine, as well as 21 revivals. The 2010–11 season also marks the 40th anniversary of Maestro Levine’s Met debut, a milestone that will be celebrated with the release of a series of CDs and DVDs of Levine live recordings, a documentary film, and a Met tour to Japan in the summer of 2011.

Gelb welcomed the audience to the Met’s packed List Hall and gave an overview of the coming season, commenting that “in scope and intensity, [the Met] is an opera house like none other in the world.” The new productions were then presented through a combination of video clips and director interviews. Opening and closing the season will be Das Rheingold and Die Walküre from Wagner’s epic Ring cycle. Director Lepage explained the concept for his highly anticipated production via live satellite link from Vancouver. “The Ring is a cosmos that comes with its own rules,” he said. “There is a delicate balance between the small, personal story of the characters and the big story in the background. One is the echo of the other, and it’s my job to try and magnify that.”

Bartlett Sher, who will direct the Met premiere of Le Comte Ory, was on hand to give an introduction to Rossini’s rarely staged French opera. The remaining four new productions were presented in video clips, combining interviews with the directors and performance footage from those productions that have been seen elsewhere. Stephen Wadsworth will direct Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. This will be followed by Verdi’s Don Carlo, in a production by Nicholas Hytner, and Willy Decker’s acclaimed staging of La Traviata. Composer-conductor John Adams and director Peter Sellars will helm the Met premiere of Adams’s 1987 opera Nixon in China.

Looking back on his unparalleled four decades with the company and ahead to the coming season, Levine summed up the afternoon’s proceedings: “Going into my 40th season is something unimaginable. I don’t quite know how it happened. But the future looks very, very bright to me.”